


Time Travel is no Sailing Trip

by Daantjie_fanatics



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Hurt Number Five | The Boy, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Number Five | The Boy has PTSD, Number Five | The Boy-centric, The Umbrella Academy (TV) Season 2 Spoilers, The Umbrella Academy (TV) Spoilers, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25788112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daantjie_fanatics/pseuds/Daantjie_fanatics
Summary: Time travel is no easy task, even if you have a suitcase, and especially when you have the energy of a 13 year old boy who’s just been through hell non-stop since you actually were 13. And now your timeline looks like headphone cords.Or,My idea of what might have happened at the end of season 2, with major Five whump. (Ignoring the Sparrow Academy)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 277





	1. Chapter 1

Five clutched the somewhat familiar briefcase with both hands. It had never felt so heavy, even when he’d been using it for murder. Gripping the clasps, his sweat smeared the leather, muscle memory fighting against lack of strength that came with having a chimney fall on your still-painfully 13-year-old frame, not to mention a frying pan to the face. His legs shook, adrenaline wearing thin. He counted his siblings, and despite knowing there was one less than when they’d arrived, Five finally felt sure they’d all make it out together. As an academy, as a family. They weren’t out of the woods yet, he knew. Knew that as well as he’d known last time. But this just _had_ to work. They were counting on him again and he couldn’t see them dead for the third time that week.

Flicking the clasps, Five steeled himself for the time vortex. Contrary to popular belief, even using the briefcase required incredible amounts of skill and extensive training. Without being familiar with the navigation, one might end up in a Vietnam war, for example. And even if it wasn’t as unpredictable as travelling himself across time, he still had to focus on surfing the hurricane, the 5 extra passengers not even calculated for when this case had been created.

His stomach dropped.

He felt the 80s pull on his clothes, and the 90’s tug on his hair, the various instances through time in which Five existed for the commission creating slip streams against the harsh flow, the forward passage of time. He willed further to not be drowned, searching for the first of April 2019, quite literally a drop in the ocean. He never thought he’d be actively searching for that date as a destination.

Breaking through the 21st Century caused the case to shake in Five’s hand, rattling against the pressure. They were losing power, losing momentum. _No_. Five would not let them be marooned again. And in a moment of crushing desperation, Five let himself become part of the loop. He matched his power to that of the case, creating a current between them. Energy ripped through his body, atoms becoming fuel cells, tearing and bursting. Five screamed. The case steadied. Allison’s hand slipped, Five opened the circuit. Just enough to electrify his family’s hands onto each other. No one would be able to let go, to which Five’s shoulders protested.

9/11 rang in his ears as they passed. He screwed his eyes shut, months ticked by. 2016, 17, 18 - he found the right exit and the ground slammed into his feet all too quickly. He regained his footing, everyone stumbling back in shock. Of course they wouldn’t have any idea of what the journey had taken out of him, that’s just how this worked. He looked around, the walls, the floor, the table in front of him with a useless old ornament... that was still there. His siblings shook pain from their hands and let out gasps of relief, Five’s torso twinged on the inhale.

“What day is it?” Luther managed to wheeze, hunched over the table. Five shook fingertips from his shoulder blades and reached for a newspaper, vision barely focused on the date.

“April 2nd 2019, a day after the apocalypse.” His vision began to fade, noise tunnelled. Something wasn’t right.

“So we stopped it?” Someone spoke to his right. His front was aflame with bullet wounds that shouldn’t exist.

“Oh God, is it over?” Five didn’t have the energy to recognise the voice, his consciousness yanked out of his body.

“-IVE”

~

He buckled over, clutching his stomach, knees in the dirt. He was at the point of purest hunger, the feeling of hooks lining the stomach, tugging with every pull of the lungs. The lungs that began to think of oxygen as potential sustenance, at least where scarcity was involved. Ash, like small but visible throwing stars, coating him on the inside, slicing at his gums with every wheeze. Without a second thought he opened his eyes and lunged, hands cupped over a cockroach, crouching like a schoolboy, and he brought it to his lips. He couldn’t afford to cry or throw up as he swallowed, and luckily he’d blocked off the instinct years ago. Shockingly, he’d heard the insect’s scuttling over the whistling storms made through ruins and the crackling fires surrounding him. He didn’t have time to dwell on that however, he looked around himself for Dolores, she’d be with his supplies if there were any left. He pushed himself to his feet, wincing terribly and panicking slightly.

“DOLORES?” He looked around himself, something wasn’t right. He pulled his attention to his hands, the fabric they were clutching. He was in uniform. He practically hit himself trying to find his beard. Shit. He should have known. As soon as he saw fire he should have known. They’d burnt out within several months. He was in the beginning. Again. Or had he always been? Had everything been a fever dream? Identifying the street, Five ran across the cracked tarmac. The academy was as he remembered. The theatre was rubble. And his siblings...

“NO!” He jolted upright, his front still in agony, but this time he was cold.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five gets to vent

Allison barely had the attention span to catch Five as he fell, grasping at his thin arm with the rest of him ending up on the floor. Everyone hung where they were in worry as Allison checked for signs to explain his faint.

“He’s out cold.” She remarked at his complete lack of response.

Diego crouched beside Five. “Could he just be, y’know, ‘out of fuel’? He must have overworked himself...” He trailed off when Allison lifted his jumper, finding the wound in his abdomen had reopened. Diego made eye contact with her, remembering all the way back to Leonard’s attic.

“He’s losing blood. Help me carry him.” She rushed, and they hoisted Five’s frame to his bedroom once again.

The Umbrella Academy stood around Five’s room in various states of unease, though collectively grateful for their mother’s resurrection- or, rather, un-death? Diego stood at the foot of Five’s bed looking between his brother and mom trying to confirm whether their existences were permanent this time. Allison, being a mother without her child nearby, projected her motherly worry onto Five where he lay next to her. Klaus, with his new-found loneliness sat on the floor staring in Five’s direction every few seconds to make sure he only saw Five in the singular, and Vanya laid her head on his shoulder in tired comfort. Luther stood in his hulking shape awkwardly in the corner, prepared and distracted.

“It’s weird” Allison noted, “it’s been years since he was stitched up for that wound the first time round... but I guess for him it hasn’t been.”

“Ten days.” Diego recalled. “That’s when he found me, and he said he’d arrived that morning.”

“In ten days he should have still been resting, nevermind doing... well,  _everything_ he was doing.” Allison looked between her siblings, “who even knows how long his stitches have been pulled.”

“He wouldn’t have told us if they were.” Vanya added, looking at the floor.

Diego sighed, “just like last time.”

Grace stood up, packing away her first aid kit and tucking Five in a little more. “Now, children, I know he won’t like to hear it, but if you could get him to stay in bed for the next few days at least - and that means even no spatial jumps - he’ll be brand new in a week.”

“Thanks mom.” Diego said, she smiled and they watched her leave. They heard her heels as she walked down the wood floorboards of the corridor, no doubt towards the kitchen.

Number Five had always been a deep sleeper, perhaps somewhat due to his constantly reeling mind, unnaturally advanced imagination completely spent by nightfall. Unstoppable force by day, and immovable object by night, Dolores had mused when watching over him. No matter the location, Five could close his eyes and be out like a light within 5 minutes, including on late night excursions with his deafening siblings to griddy’s donuts (to his defence, being on a full stomach made anyone drowsy). This had proved an evolutionary advantage in the apocalypse, where upstanding, non-infested beds were few and far between, and growing steadily unfamiliar until feather-stuffed pillows had become far too soft for him to fully rest on without reminding him of the give oil-slick rivers had. Five could just about make peace with the lumpy mattresses motels rented when on the job for commission. And as for after his return, his bed had remained untouched for favour of car seats and library corners, unless unconsciousness was forced. And if his siblings had not picked up on this, well, he’d keep it that way for as long as possible even if he still had as much a lack of controlling his body asleep as he’d always had. Only, now embarrassing drooling had been traded in for traumatic nightly terrors.

That’s why when Klaus had started a bet with “I give him five minutes after waking up before he teleports” no one had kept an eye on Five’s behaviour, supposing the complete absence there of.

Amongst the loud declarations of evidence in their memories of Five’s sleeping habits 17 years ago, Five breathed deeper than usual. Then it hitched. He furrowed his eyebrows. Vanya, whose attempts at quieting her siblings proved futile, studied Five with interest.

Five’s sleep pattern had long since been disrupted; with illness and acid rain, and with a paranoia instilled in him somewhere untraceable- childish, he’d admitted, like a fear of the dark. He’d never asked himself why he’d felt the need to carry the extra weight of a shotgun through the burning heats of a desolate world, where his rations were thought out and he made up 100% of human population, any living creature worth defending against no bigger than his thumb anyway. Dolores had never asked. But he looked after and attuned himself to this weapon, reaching for it whenever he woke, like company. He’d felt justified the day the Handler arrived, fumbling dumbly under the pressure of actually needing it, of having been watched all these years as he’d felt. 

Being part of the commission required sleeplessness in the job description. Never trust another, never trust a shadow, and always sleep with an eye open. Besides, every day on the job added to his playlist of shuffled nightmares.

Five clenched his fists helplessly.

Vanya noticed, the air shifting. “Guys!”

Allison turned around immediately, looking to comfort him. But Five’s hands were starting to fizz with the snap of thunder between his knuckles. They saw the blue shudder, as it did when he was out of power. Allison gripped his forearms.

  
*~*

The scene shifted. But Five was still powerless. Pointed fingernails brushed his wrists, fingertips melting his skin with marked possession. His vision was clouded with something.

The woman sighed. “Oh good! You’re still alive” she looked back at his siblings.  _ Lucky you. You got to see how this all played out . _

He couldn’t fight in this state, so instinctively, he fled.

He barely sat, more crumpled against something firm, steady, stacked with memory. He raised a weak hand to wipe away blood from his nose, feeling some bubble down his throat as he gasped for air. The library, that’s where he must be. As a child, he’d spent his thirty minutes allocated free time reading anything that could fill the time; Ben with his romantic fictions lying across the window seat, Five below him cross-legged with a novel in some distant part of history, later books on theories of time travel. Sometimes when his eyes grew distant, he’d look up behind him, at Ben mouthing along to his own, needing to just remind himself of where he was and why. Because someday they wouldn’t be, he hoped to take them all somewhere they couldn’t be exhausted by Reginald and his gaslighting.

But it had gone horribly wrong, and all the libraries he’d squatted in from then on had books smudged with ash and water-damage, on survival, insects, and lost romantic fiction (even if he didn’t relate to much of what they had to say, excusing Dolores). And there was Vanya’s autobiography, which he’d read grievously until he couldn’t take those truths anymore and began scrawling across the pages with numbered hopes, hopes he’d return to the time when he’d left. Clearing his eyes he always looked up to a harsh sky with no stars or moon to give him light. Five shivered.

A shadow passed in front of him. Vanya was crouching there. The sister who let him read while she played to him, who his arrogance hadn’t spared, whose body he hadn’t found. This was sick, seeing her now. He’d called for her in the beginning, whispered later.

“Yes, Five. It’s me ... listen.”

She touched his hands. He felt itchy.

Then he felt it. The soft thrumming of life. He felt her heartbeat - Undeniable evidence. He zeroed in on the feeling, holding onto her wrist with all the energy he had.

Slowly Vanya’s face came into focus. She looked hesitant, and Five immediately understood why. As a child, no one had taken the time or effort to bond with her, to hold her. She’d taught herself she was undeserving of any contact from her family, the instinct was foreign. Likewise, Five had grown up building an arrogant, unlikeable persona, because emotions are a weakness to be exploited. And how could his siblings tolerate him when he was so damn self-centred? Obviously it was ideal that they wouldn’t touch him, until they couldn’t. Until his bad habits had him all alone in the apocalypse and he no longer knew how to be close to someone (alive).

“Five? Can I...”

Five all but lunged at her. She was shocked to say the least, propping him upright against her. He held on, ear pressed to her chest where he could hear her heartbeat so clearly. He wanted to commit it to memory, wanted to replace all those silent moments at night that had only the smell of cooking corpses. He was fifty-fucking-eight and here he was clinging to his youngest sister, like a child - it was downright unmentionable. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to let go.

“Sh-sh Five, it’s okay. You saved us, it’s over.” She brought a hand up to his head to card through his hair. He sobbed. Vanya stilled.

“It ... it is over, right Five?”

Five was silent for a few minutes, not wanting to sully the moment. He breathed defeatedly, “not for me.”

“Talk to me.” Vanya encouraged him. Five let go of her and forced himself to sit upright against the bookshelves, which were not very comfortable shirtless. He noticed his siblings had entered the room, impressed with how silent they must have been for him not to notice.

Five sighed, trying to make eye contact and failing. He might as well start at the beginning.

“In 2002, I ran away. And you all died. 45 years later, in 1963 the first time round, you all died. Again. And I ran away, faster. Then I didn’t run. I stood with you all and I died with you, but still not fast enough. I keep running but it keeps not being over for me. You just keep fucking dying.”

Five laughed exasperatedly, running a clammy hand through his hair. His legs were sore from all the running.

“Five, when was the last time you slept?” Vanya asked innocently. Five honestly couldn’t remember.

“When I last needed to.” He was irked by how his siblings continued to treat global catastrophe as a personal issue; like something he could just sleep on and it would get better. He needed to  _do_ something. “Pass me my jacket.”

Allison held it out to him, and he reached for it.

“Was that- is that my hand on your shoulder.”

Five looked over at the newly forming bruises on his back, curse his easily hurt teenage body. “Not your fault.” He slipped his arms through the sleeves.

Allison looked unconvinced. Five explained that he was forced to electrify their hands to prevent them from slipping.

“You can do that?” Diego asked, confused.

“In a way.” Five answered. “That’s not important right now.”

He uncapped a whiteboard marker and started scrawling numbers over the floorboards in front of him.

“Did anyone else see where that pen came from?” Luther murmured.

Reaching into his pocket, Five pulled out his copy of Vanya’s book, skimming through the pages to part of the equation he needed. This way he was hunching over was doing very little to help the growing agony twisting in his centre. His siblings must have noticed his struggle because Allison tried to intervene.

“Five, can’t this wait? We’re in no imminent danger of the world ending. Can’t you just rest for a little while?”

“No.” Five hunched over, grimacing. “I may have saved your lives, but mine still very much hangs in the balance. Excuse me if I’d like to stop my gut feeling like popcorn.”

Diego shifted his stance, “popcorn... like feels like butterflies, like nerves?”

Five gave him a murderous stare. “No, you simpleton, like actual popcorn. Like, like the atoms in my body are literally exploding and re-growing from existing across two realities.”

“Is this like some kind of paradox psychosis thing?” Luther asked hesitantly.

“Worse. Much worse. A paradox like two of the same person existing in close proximity to one another is, in the sense of a timeline, like it folds back on itself and touches. Think of time like a shoelace - I mean it isn’t, but your brains couldn’t understand it any way. All of your timelines now loop back to 1963 and forward again, which is fine. But I prevented my own death and interfered  _directly_ with my own timeline, never mind preventing an apocalypse.”

“Five what do you mean?” Allison looked at him sceptically. Five was breathing heavily. “You didn’t die.”

“Exactly, you don’t remember because I made sure it didn’t happen, only from my perspective is there any record of my death.”

“What. When?” Allison was growing concerned.

“You all died.” Five looked across the faces of his siblings, tired. Then rushed to speak, “and I don’t mean like the previous times where I found your bodies in the apocalypses. I mean, in that barn we all died,” Five looked Diego in the eye. “even Lila.”

“How?” Allison looked to her siblings.

“The Handler.” Diego answered.

Five nodded. “And she died how she was always meant to die. But before that she gunned everyone of you down... I survived by luck, or my height.” He tried not to remember the bodies of his siblings in the hay, dressed in what they wore now. It was yet another image he couldn’t forget amongst the other several reasons to fight harder against the apocalypse. He’d seen them dead in the flesh three times since he first time travelled - twice in the last week. “I did what I had to. I turned back time and prevented the Handler from shooting all of you and I don’t regret any minute, even if it was dad’s idea.”

His siblings looked down on him with pity and fondness.

“Only, now my body is conscious of the two instances, when I died and when I survived. The difficult trip to 2019 must have reminded it of the conflicting realities because now it feels like the bullets are simultaneously entering and leaving my body as they had before. My timeline has one giant knot at that point of my existence.”

“What do we do.” Luther said resolutely. His siblings flanked him.

“ _We_ ,” Five emphasised, “do nothing. I already fixed you,  _I_ have got to fix this myself.”

“No.” Allison said resolutely.

Five didn’t quite know what to do with that. “Excuse me?”

“I said no. We’re helping.” Allison repeated.

“You can’t time travel.” Five reached a hand behind him for the shelf, supporting himself heavily as he stood. His legs protested loudly. “How could you help me with this.”

“You tell us.” She responded.

“Do you understand quantum physics?” Five asked sarcastically, “do you know the differentials of paradox variations, or is all you know based on Back to the Future?”

“Five, you know what,” Luther got defensive, “no. We don’t know all that stuff. Because we didn’t lock ourselves away as kids to study time and stuff and then run away only to come back at the end of the world-“

“Do you think I  wanted to run away? Do you think I did it because I thought I was better than all of you or some bullshit like that.  Do you think \- you know what” Five cut himself off. “You guys don’t deserve an explanation, I survived hell for 45 years and then killed innocents just to get here. I did fine on my own, so have it your way. I’m leaving.”

Despite his condition, Five pulled together all the energy he could and took a hold of the fabric in space and time and  _ripped_ it open. He forced himself through.

His only motive was to stop the pain, recent and ancient aches deep inside him. Maybe when he got back home he’d forgive them.

Maybe they’d even take care of him.

Maybe he wouldn’t deserve it. But he wanted to.


End file.
